IBM Announces Deal to Acquire Both Phytel and Explorys; Goal Is Data Transformation

On April 12, IBM executives announced the creation of a new business unit called Watson Health, which whose umbrella will encompass the acquisition of Phytel and Explorys

Senior executives at the Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM announced in a press conference held on Monday afternoon, April 13, at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago, during the course of the HIMSS Conference, that it was acquiring both the Dallas-based Phytel and the Cleveland-based Explorys, in a combination that senior IBM executives said held great potential for the leveraging of data capabilities to transform healthcare.

Both Phytel, a leading population health management vendor, and Explorys, a healthcare intelligence cloud firm, will become part of the new Watson Health unit, about which IBM said, “IBM Watson Health is creating a more complete and personalized picture of health, powered by cognitive computing. Now individuals are empowered to understand more about their health, while doctors, researchers, and insurers can make better, faster, and more cost-effective decisions.

In its announcement of the Phytel acquisition, the company noted that, “The acquisition once completed will bolster the company’s efforts to apply advanced analytics and cognitive computing to help primary care providers, large hospital systems and physician networks improve healthcare quality and effect healthier patient outcomes.”

And in its announcement of the Explorys acquisition, IBM noted that, “Since its spin-off from the Cleveland Clinic in 2009, Explorys has secured a robust healthcare database derived from numerous and diverse financial, operational and medical record systems comprising 315 billion longitudinal data points across the continuum of care. This powerful body of insight will help fuel IBM Watson Health Cloud, a new open platform that allows information to be securely de-identified, shared and combined with a dynamic and constantly growing aggregated view of clinical, health and social research data.”

Mike Rhodin of IBM at Monday'spress conference

Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, IBM Watson, said at Monday’s press conference, “Connecting the data and information is why we need to pull the information together into this [Watson Health]. So we’re extending what we’ve been doing with Watson into this. We’re bringing in great partners to help us fulfill the promise of an open platform to build solutions to leverage data in new ways. We actually believe that in the data are the answers to many of the diseases we struggle with today, the answers to the costs in healthcare,” he added. “It’s all in there, it’s all in silos. All this data needs to be able to be brought into a HIPAA-secured, cloud-enabled framework, for providers, payers, everyone. To get the answers, we look to the market, we look to world-class companies, the entrepreneurs who had the vision to begin to build this transformation.”

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